Ersatz Division question

[Volcano Man]

Ed,
I notice the German Ersatz divisions have no machineguns. Cron and Nash state that the Brigade Ersatz battalions that comprised thes divisions had mg sections. Cron's english language version even allocates machine gun sections per Ersatz division, pp. 328-329.

Why did you decide to leave these out?

What, are you scouring every source you can find to locate a error? Don't worry, you will find an OOB problem eventually, I am not perfect. ;) At some point though, a work is a work, and it is there until someone can make something better (ie. a book, a boardgame, a movie). But I can't imagine why you would be reading Cron - its not a good read, and BTW, Cron's English language version is full of errors, and I mean terrible errors. My copy is so full of pencil marks from correcting stuff from the German version, that it is hardly any use without them.

To answer the question though: All I saw was that the Ersatz divisions had "6 machine gun sections" in the whole division, not companies, sections. So, when you factor in the known MG shortage (mentioned in the notes I think), and the fact that the Germans were constantly pushing MGs "down" the chain to the front line units (nearly the entire 1st line reserve divisions were lacking their full compliment of MGs, which was a huge problem), and factor in that the Germans had to replace MG losses, and also factor in that the Germans were constantly trying to expand their MG forces, then it didn't seem to make sense to me to create a new MG section component for the German ersatz.

What I mean is, if there are "6 machine gun sections" in a German ersatz division, and knowing that a section is 2 MGs, it would mean that each Ersatz *brigade*, not battalion, would have a 2 MG (30 men) unit assigned to it. This is hardly worth modeling IMO, so I left them out, again in light of the fact that there was an MG shortage and the low concentration of the unit. This is a similar case to why I left out pioneer sections and such, and I probably should have left out some of those Landwehr artillery batteries as well, but it is hard to draw the line, so to speak, "the line" just kind of forms. For the latter (artillery batteries), I tried to draw the line at a full battery.

You might have heard that a designer needs to make the judgment call to "leave some guns behind", well, I suppose the short answer is that I chose to leave these behind because unlike allied MG units of 30 men for each infantry battalion, this would be 30 men for each ersatz infantry brigade -- hardly something worth throwing in, given the circumstances mentioned above. In other words, even though allied MGs were in 2 gun sections (30 men units), this was a doctrinal thing they did, but it still meant that there were 6-8 MGs per brigade, which was nearly identical to the Germans, they were just concentrated differently. But when you start talking about 2 MGs per an entire brigade, then I felt it was good place to stop.